How Do Ideas Become General in their Signification?

Abstraction is one of the central notions in philosophy and cognitive science. Though its origins are often traced to Locke, various senses of abstraction have been developed in fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science (e.g. Barsalou 2005). The notion of abstraction on which I am focusing here is as that of a process of similarities recognition across instances of a given kind involving progressive exclusion of instance details. As such, abstraction plays a major role in concept-formation and learning. Traditionally, abstraction models have been deemed circular (e.g. Berkeley 1710/1957), while in recent years abstraction models have also come under fire for being incoherent (e.g. Hendriks-Jansen 1996), requiring large conceptual resources in order to operate, and so forth. Here, I flesh out a psychological process on the basis of which general ideas are formed out of representations of particulars. The main characteristics of the suggested view are that abstract representations are structured entities with general representational powers, while a major role is given to top-down effects in perception. I argue that the challenges that both traditional and modern abstraction accounts faced are avoided in the light of the present suggestion

Communicating content

This paper aims to develop a unified account of communication, competence and reference fixing that surpasses problems with two of the most influential views on the philosophical market, neodescriptivism and the 'locking’ theory. Our charge is that the conditions upon communication are less substantive than the neo-descriptivist account requires and the conditions upon reference-fixing are more substantive than those provided by the locking-view. In order to avoid the problems that neodescriptivist views face (e.g. holism), we suggest that the shareability of a specific set of inferences, or dispositions to infer, is not a prerequisite for conceptual shareability. In order to avoid the infamous ‘which-properties-speakers-lock-on’ problem of the locking-view, we establish a more robust causal relation between concepts and their referents

Back to our senses : An empiricist on concept acquisition

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Intuition & reason: re-assessing dual-process theories with representational sub-activation

There is a prevalent distinction in the literature on reasoning, between Type-1 processes, (fast, automatic, associative, heuristic and intuitive); and Type-2 processes (rule-based, analytical and reflective). In this paper, we follow up recent empirical evidence [De Neys (2006b); Osman (2013)] in favour of a unitary cognitive system. More specifically, we suggest that intuitions (T1-processes) are sub-activated representations, which are in turn influenced by the weightings of the connections between different representations. Furthermore, we explain biases by appealing to the role of attention in thinking processes. The suggested view explains reasoning and bias whilst dealing with extant problems facing dual-process accounts